Online services such as The Microsoft Network offer facilities for multiple users to simultaneously chat with each other in real-time. In general, a chat room is provided to members of the service for remote discussion on a particular topic. In part because of the relative anonymity of the participants, chat channel conversations often get out of hand, become off-topic, offensive and even create possible legal issues for the online service provider.
To deal with such improper use, online services hire employees to monitor chat room conversations, and provide these (human) monitors with the ability to apply penalties to offending users. Such penalties include the ability to "ban" a user, i.e., permanently or semi-permanently prevent the user from connecting to the chat channel or server, or "kick" a user, i.e., cause a one-time removal of the user from the chat channel. Less drastically, the service can place a user in a "spectate" mode, which allows the user to view the conversation but prevents the user from publicly speaking in the chat channel for a period of time. Lastly, the service can "warn" the user instead of applying one of the more severe penalties.
However, in order to apply one of these penalties or warn a lesser offender, current solutions require substantial intervention by a human being. First, the monitor observing improper chat room conversation applies a suitable penalty to an offender. Then, if a penalty was applied, each time the user connects, the penalty needs to be re-applied. Later, subsequent human intervention is required for removal of the penalty at the appropriate time. As can be appreciated, this is expensive in terms of manpower and leads to errors which can alienate subscribing members.
In addition, chat room participants have no consistent way in which to register complaints against (allegedly) offending other users. As a result, to effectively monitor what is taking place in the chat room, each chat room requires an active and dedicated monitor at virtually all times. Moreover, even if a complaint is received by the online service, (e.g., via e-mail), there is no consistently reliable and impartial record by which to mediate the complaint on its merits. Lastly, conventional monitoring solutions are based on the client-side. If the client used for monitoring crashes, the monitoring ceases even though the chat room may still be being accessed by participants connected through other clients.